This was the normal tenure of life for the wife of the well-to-do Athenian. The wives of the poor went, of course, freely about their shopping, and as time went on even the wealthier women took more part in public entertainments. That the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides (of unhappy matrimonial experience) spoke bitterly of them, and that the comic poets Aristophanes and Menander satirised them, is quite true; but the common inference, that they express a contempt for women more offensive or more widespread at Athens than in recent England, is quite wrong. Their gibes and strictures really show that the conscience of Athens was pricked at the injustice and irrationality of its system, that a feminist movement was felt, and that conservatives were struggling against it with their customary exaggeration, and humorists making trade of it, as they do to-day. This movement for reform began as soon as the material struggle for establishment was over, and the culture of Athens opened its splendour. Long before the age of Pericles and Pheidias the women of Athens were stirred with a breath of ambition from the eastern isles. The women of Æolia had, as I said, more freedom and education; and Athenians might have reflected, when they made their strictures on woman's intelligence, that where, among their own kin, the artificial restriction was not imposed women quickly proved their capacity for art and letters. Of the voluminous work of Sappho we have scant remnants, but those resplendent fragments are enough to justify her title as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Athenians seem to have evaded the moral by loading her memory with calumnies about her life and death, which many modern writers are unwilling to accept. In her time Sappho had about her a number of able, but less brilliant, women writers, and pupils came from all parts of the Greek world to feel the glow of the new-lit fire. There are reasons for thinking that Sappho went beyond literary ambition, and was exiled for interfering in some political trouble. However, the stifling atmosphere of Persia came over the eastern Greek world, and the fire dwindled and died.